The line width for semiconductor manufacturing is getting smaller and smaller. The difficulty for element inspection is accordingly increased while the critical dimension (CD) of the manufacturing process is decreasing. Therefore, the semiconductor industry needs an inspection technology with features of high-resolution capability, nondestructive-inspection and high efficiency to fulfill the inspection requirements of the semiconductor manufacturing process. According to current trends, a transmission small angle X-ray scattering (tSAXS) would be an important inspection technology for the next generation.
However, the duration of the measurement is too long for current commercial use of tSAXS devices or laboratory use of tSAXS devices, which are not qualified for efficiency requirements of the production line detection. Therefore, in an inspection method, the process duration of the measurement and the analysis of the process critical dimension could be shortened by developing a scattering enhancement module to directly enhance the scattering intensity of the X ray scattering. By doing so, the inspection efficiency of the critical dimension of the manufacturing process for the tSAXS devices could be significantly improved.
However, in this inspection method, an enhancing piece is disposed in front of a test piece. In addition to that the enhancing piece is controlled to be parallel to the test piece; a range of the distance between these two pieces requires to be further controlled to tens up to hundreds of nanometers to achieve an enhanced result. Currently, there is no feasible way to adjust these two pieces to be at appropriate positions under such small scale conditions. Therefore, how to adjust the enhancing piece and the test piece to be at appropriate relative positions is an important issue so far.